Painting the posh ..... Madam Le Brun ...... on the wireless today

Vigée Le Brun, my Wikipedia tells me "was a French painter who mostly specialized in portrait painting, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries"*

Élisabeth Louise Vigée, Self Portrait, after 1782

And what a fascinating women she was.

Her life and work is discussed on this week's edition of In Our Time.**

"Misha Glenny and guests discuss the French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842). 

From her teens she delighted her high society subjects in and around Paris, notably Marie Antoinette who she painted around 30 times, and she invariably found ways to show her sitters at their best. 

Some critics were affronted that she, a young woman, dared paint at all and, when they saw how good her portraits were, some spread a rumour that surely this could not really be her work and she must have had a secret male lover finishing her portraits in a studio. 

The French Revolution forced Vigée Le Brun out of France and so she set off from one European court to another to find more success from Naples to Vienna to St Petersburg and to London, eventually settling back in France. Today her works are on show in major galleries around the world.

With Rosalind Polly Blakesley,Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge, Robert Wenley, Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, and, Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings at The National Gallery, London.

Producer: Simon Tillotson"

Location; In Our Time, BBc Radio 4

Picture; Élisabeth Louise Vigée, Self Portrait, after 1782, National Gallery, Location; room 33, Accession number, NG1653

*Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lisabeth_Vig%C3%A9e_Le_Brun

**Vigée Le Brun, In Our Time, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002y1gt 

The secrets of the Old Road and the Isles …….. marl pits and water filled ponds

Now, we have lost most of the features of our rural past, here in Chorlton.

The Old Road, 2016

But just occasionally there are still a few hints of that past.

Of these there is the Old Road which stretches out from Chorlton across Turn Moss and on to Stretford.

I call it the Old Road, but most people will know it as Hawthorn Lane, although on official documents from the mid-19th century it was called Back Lane, while parts of it were also referred to as the Cut hole Lane and Town’s Bank.

It is somewhere I have written about in the past and keep coming back to.*

Once it will have been used by farmers transporting produce to the Duke’s Canal and the raised roadway underneath the canal’s aqueduct, bears witness to the need to protect pedestrians from passing wagons.

Even now, if you walk the route there is a sense that you are walking a country lane, with the overhanding trees, the remnants of hawthorn fences and the twisty nature of the lane.

And it is filled with history, starting with the site of Sally’s Hole, a pond which dates to at least the 18th century was only filled in, sometime in the 1960s.

The Old Road, circa 1900

That said, the scene on either side bears little witness to what it would have one looked like.

The mass of trees, and bushes would have been absent and instead the area was very much open land with the od avenue of trees.

And had you walked the lane two centuries ago you might well have caught sight of the “marl men” engaged in extracting marl from pits which was used to spread on the land.

Marl which contains carbonate of lime was a cheap substitute for lime and spreading it on the land would enhance the land’s fertility for up to twelve years.

Writing in 1899, H T Crofton in his book on Stretford, drew on older authorities who recorded that “most of the old pitsheads yet extant in the fields have been quarries whence marl has been obtained.

In marling, the gaffer of the pit, who controlled the falls and excavations, was called ‘My Lord’.  Passersby were solicited to contribute to the marling or shutting, or feast, at the conclusion of their laborer’s”.

Marl Pits, 1853

These pits could be quite substantial and involved clearing the top soil and then "‘shooting the pace’ which involved “making a broad way of a very easie ascent and descent for the convenience of fetching out the marl”.**

The degree to which this was a lucrative business can be seen in one legal dispute concerning the extraction of marl during the 17th century and the large number of pits in the area around Oswald and Longford roads, which was known as the Isles due to the larger number of pits and lazy watercourses which stretched out across the land.

The 1853 OS map shows plenty of these, and according to H T Crofton the area around what was once Firs Farm was similarly dug.

Most filled with water, and in time must have been a source of concern for parents.

Next; Firs Farm

Pictures; The Old Road, 2014, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, the Old Road, circa 1900, from the Lloyd Collection and detail from the 1841 OS Map of Lancashire courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/


*The Old Road, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Old%20Road

**A History of the Ancient Chapel of Stretford H T Crofton, 1899

Lost and forgotten streets of Salford ........... nu 35 walking along Greengate in the winter of 1849

Greengate in 1849

Now I don’t think there will be many pictures of Greengate in the winter of 1849.

All of which leaves me with a map and a street directory.

The map is self explanatory but street directories may need a bit of an explanation.

They were as they suggest a list of the people and businesses to be found on  the streets of Manchester and Salford.

They came out every year which means that you can track someone more closely than the census which was issued every ten years.

The downside is they only listed the householder missed out those who were deemed unimportant and by extension left out the small and mean back streets.

Greengate from 1 to 35, 1850

That said armed with the names of those householders, it is possible to go looking for them in the census returns from 1841 through to 1921 along with the 1939 Register and once found with a bit deft trawling it is possible to find the missing people and the missing streets.

All of which means that I think we may soon have a new series taking the story of lost and forgotten streets of Salford into the very homes of those who lived on Greengate and Chapel Street, and of course the neighbouring ones.

Greengate from 6 to 34, 1850

So for now I shall be a tad lazy and leave you with the map from 1849 and the first group of residents from the following year.

Now given that the list for 1850 will have been compiled in the winter of 1849 I think we can be confident that in our walk along Greengate we would have been able to meet George Hooley, hairdresser living at number 9 and Thomas Tower who served the pints at the Polytechnic Tavern opposite.

Picture; Greengate 1849, from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1844-49 courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

Chorlton farmers ............. Mr and Mrs Bancroft farming at Park Brow from 1841

Now I don’t have a picture of James Bancroft, but given that he was born in 1802 and spent his life at the plough I doubt he would have had the time or the inclination “to sit and be done in oils.”

The gravestone of James and Betty Bancroft

But I know a bit about him and it is enough to take the story of Park Brow Farm into another chapter.

In 1851 he was farming 60 acres of land and living with his wife Elizabeth and their six children in the eight roomed farmhouse on the corner of what is now Sandy Lane and St Werburgh’s Road.

I can’t be sure but I think the family will have moved into the tenancy sometime between 1838 and 1841.

They were originally from Stretford and their last child was born in Stretford in 1838 but three years later they appear on the census return at Park Brow.

And there the family stayed well into the 1880s, by which time James and Elizabeth were dead and the farm was run by their two unmarried daughters.

As Chorlton farms go Park Brow was at the top end of the middling farms.  The very big ones like Barlow Hall Farm at 300 acres and Hough End Hall and Dog House Farm at 240 were big, but there were plenty more that were much smaller and the majority of land holdings were between just 1 to nine acres.

At which point it is worth saying that Hough End Hal and Dog House were actually in Withington not Chorlton.

60 acres  would have made Mr and Mrs Bancroft respectable farmers whose land was split between arable and meadow land.

In 1851 they employed four agricultural labourers of which three lived with them and like the family had all been born in Stretford.

“Living in” was still a common practice in the middle decades of the 19th century and while the labourers got paid less their board, and lodging came free and usually they could expect their clothes to be washed and mended.

Park Brow Farm in 1845

In most cases the agreement lasted for a full year and it was a system which suited both farmer and worker and tended to apply particularly to young employees.

The farmer got the guarantee of a labourer for the year and the farm worker was assured somewhere to stay which was especially important when as was often the case they were still quite young.

So of our three living in labourers in 1851 one was 20, the second 17, and the third just 15 and a decade later the carter Edward Cook and the cowman Isaac Evans were both 17.

Like most of the farms in the township the land belonging to the farm was spread out and so while the Bancroft’s rented land along the north side of what is now Sandy Lane it was interspersed with fields farmed by Thomas Cookson and George Lunt and the rest of the Park Bow fields were off to the south beyond Chorlton Brook.

In time I will go looking for the rest of the family but for now I shall just leave you with that sombre fact that James and Elizabeth’s gravestone in the old parish churchyard survived the developers and can still be seen today.

Location; Park Brow Farm, Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Picture, gravestone of James and Elizabeth Bancroft, Chorlton parish church Yard, 2009, and Park Brow 1845 from the Tithe Map from the collections of Andrew Simpson and Philip Lloyd

Painting Well Hall and Eltham ....... nu 8 ....... magic days and evenings by the Tudor Barn

An occasional series featuring buildings and places I like and painted by Peter Topping.

The Barn, 2017

I am guessing we all have our favourite memories of the Tudor Barn and the Pleasaunce.

Mine run from wandering around the gardens on warm sunny days with a girl friend enjoying that heady sense of romance mixed with the memories of the sunlight playing on the moat and the orange coloured brick work of the Barn

And if there is one special memory it will be of a Blues and Folk night sometime in the summer of 1966.

I can’t remember who was on but there was something magical about sitting in the small open air theatre listening to the music with all that history as a backdrop.

Junior Showtime in the Pleasaunce, 1967

For years afterwards I cherished the poster of the event which I bought for a shilling  from the entertainments office of the Council, and as you do I pasted it on the wall of my bedroom.

It featured a guitar and a pair of Chelsea boots in black on a white background and always reminded me of the Pleasaunce.

For my sisters one of their special moments might well be those summer entertainments put on during the holidays and featuring all sorts of kid’s entertainers.

By chance one of those Junior Showtime’s was photographed by the local paper and the clipping with our Jill aged about nine staring back at the camera has survived.

And there hangs a perfect moment in time down at the Tudor Barn.

Painting; The Tudor Barn © 2017 Peter Topping from a photograph by Scott MacDonald circa 2013

Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Facebook: Paintings from Pictures; https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Picture; Well Hall courtesy of Scott McDonald and Junior Showtime, August 20 1967 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Working the fields of Chorlton

We have very few working pictures of when we were still a rural community.

And so it is always exciting when one turns up and I get permission to write about it.

This one is in the collection of Carolyn Willitts who has kindly allowed me to use it.

There is no date but looking at the clothes of the chap on the left it might date from the early years of the last century. Now I am researching the machinery in the picture and this might fix the date. We shall see.

One of the men is a relative of Carolyn’s and he worked on Red Gate Farm which was close to the site of the library. There had been a farm here from the 1780s* and I guess much earlier.

By the 1840s the tenant farmer was William Whitelegg who farmed 68 acres of land which stretched out on either side of Manchester Road.

 It was mix of meadow, arable and pasture with an orchard.

He grew wheat and oats, along with potatoes, swedes, turnips, and mangle wurzuls, and raspberries and currants.**

But back to the picture. It is almost impossible to locate but it is just possible that it was between Ryebank Road and Longford Brook. Maps from the 1840s show a line of trees stretching out from Edge Lane.

 By the early years of the 20th century some of these beyond Ryebank Road were still standing and even today there are a few left roughly in the same place. So these may be the line which appear the photograph.

For me it is the detail that is fascinating. The man to the left holds one of those ceramic jars which might have been full of anything from water to beer and even cider. 

And there is no reason to suppose it wasn’t cider. Chorlton had plenty of orchards and there is anecdotal evidence of old cider presses turning up in the township. Most of the apples would have destined for the markets of Manchester but some at least would have been retained for home use.

It is one of only five pictures I have come across of men working the fields here in Chorlton and takes us back to a time now almost out of living memory. And it is all the more remarkable because we know one of the people in the picture.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; working the land, date unknown from the collection of Carolyn Willitts


*Yates map of 1786 shows the farm

** From an advert for the sale of the farm contents of Red Gate Farm, Manchester Examiner & Times, November 3rd 1855, Issue 711, British Library of newspapers

Looking down on Eltham in the late 1960s

The aerial photograph has got to be one of those powerful ways of capturing a scene.

So here we are flying over Eltham sometime in the late 1960s or early 70s.

Over to our left just below the centre of the image is the parish church and behind it on Well Hall Road and the High Street is Burtons now a fast food restaurant.

Travel up the High Street and on the right at the junction with Passey Place is the old ABC cinema.

Now I could go on but rather think the fun of the picture is about leaving it up to you to wander over the view identifying the landmarks.

Location; Eltham, London

Picture; from Looking At Eltham, Eltham Society, 1970, supplied by the Kentish Times